Here's your sign to pivot (Why I pivoted in my first week)

To pivot or not to pivot? This is the age old question that every entrepreneur faces at one point or another. While I wish the answer was as easy as seeing a random blog post on IndieHackers, it is much more complicated than that.

Although, not all is lost. Reading other builder’s stories can provide inspiration and hopefully get you one step closer to the answer. So I thought it would be useful for me to share my experience with how I pivoted my business within the first week of starting it.

To catch you up to speed, my name is Justin 👋 and I’m currently building TrustUGC - a software tool that helps businesses increase revenue by leveraging video and text testimonials. But that is not what TrustUGC started as…

Our original vision

Originally, my co-founder and I saw a gap with how content creators working with brands receive and share reviews. You can easily look up reviews on a company using one of the countless websites out there (Trustpilot, G2, etc), but for content creators there was no such thing. We set out to build exactly that.

What came next

Next, we made an effort to get on the phone with as many content creators as possible. The goal? To understand how we can best build this platform, and ultimately provide enough value for them to pay on a monthly basis.

The more creators we spoke to, the more we learned that they want control over their reviews. We discovered 2 problems with our current vision:

1. Nobody wants to pay for a platform that could give them bad reviews
2. We would have to enforce legitimacy among the reviews

It would be a great deal of work to try and balance those two problems, and as a 2 person team we started thinking of other ways we can help content creators.

Enter the pivot

To tackle the first problem, we would give users complete control over their reviews. To tackle the second problem, we shifted our vision from creating a reviews platform to creating a tool for our users to collect, manage, and share their reviews. Reviews became testimonials, and by the end of the week our vision for the company had changed entirely.

Wrapping things up

So in a rollercoaster of a week my co-founder and I learned a lot. Talking to your customers can give you a lot of clarity on what you need to build, and for us, was a critical step towards deciding to pivot. When starting out I believe it’s important to keep your mind open to new ideas, and not be stubborn when it comes to pivoting. Pivoting turned out to be a great decision and we’ve even begun offering our services to businesses as well.

I hope my experience can offer some insight to other builders out there, and maybe lead you one step closer to making your decision. If you’d like to connect feel free to hit me up on Twitter. You can also follow along TrustUGC’s journey on Twitter!